


Breathe

by HatakeKaede



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen, Human Trafficking, Mental Health Issues, Police Violence, post 17x06
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28485309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HatakeKaede/pseuds/HatakeKaede
Summary: Everyone keeps telling Andrew how proud they are of him and how well he is doing. But when he and Carina set off to chase after the human trafficking ring that Opal is a part of, something bad is just bound to happen.
Relationships: Andrew DeLuca/Meredith Grey, Andrew Deluca & Carina Deluca, Maya Bishop/Carina DeLuca
Comments: 5
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the A/N at the end of this chapter

As they waited at a red light, about two vehicles behind Opal’s car, Carina dared to throw a side glance at her baby brother. His eyes were glued to the red hair of the woman they were following and he kept tapping the fingers of his right hand nervously on his knee.  
“Have you talked to Papa lately?” she asked finally.  
“No,” he said curtly, straightening in his seat.  
“I’m worried about him.”  
“So am I,” he said, letting out a long sigh. “It’s just that I don’t think I can talk to him and be okay. I need more time.”  
She grasped his hand into hers.  
“I’m proud of you, Andrea,” Carina told him.  
“Thank you,” he whispered back, trying to convey that he wasn’t expressing his gratitude for her immediate words, but for the fact that she had never given up on him and stuck with him even if he had kept on pushing her away.

As ‘Opal’ turned into a street in one of Seattle’s suburbs, not very different from the one where Meredith had her home, Andrew watched as the red-headed lady parked in front of a large house which didn’t appear to be any different from the neighboring houses at first glance. He told Carina to take a left and they parked her car on the curb in the next street.  
“Aren’t we overdoing it with this sneaking around thing a little?” his sister questioned as he yanked her by her arm and pulled her to walk down the street to the level of the house that ‘Opal” had disappeared into.  
“What are we doing exactly?” she asked in Italian.  
“There’s a lockdown happening if you haven’t noticed. I’m trying to find a house where there isn’t someone working from home or kids learning online.”  
“And what do you intend to do once you find one?”  
“Climb,” he instructed her towards the low wooden gate of a house that had no garage or cars parked in the driveway.  
“What if they just don’t own a car?”  
“They don’t. Or maybe they’ve got just one. And see what else they’ve got? An empty bicycle stand. Whoever lives here has taken their bikes and left.”  
“Alright, Sherlock Holmes,” she grumbled as she put one of her legs over the gate after making sure that there was nobody walking their dog on the street or looking from their window.  
“I still say this is the time we call the police,” Carina argued.  
“No,” Andrew protested vehemently. “Not until we are completely sure we have enough proof so that they can nail her for good.”  
“But what about the girl? Erin? Wouldn’t her statement be enough?”  
“Maybe, maybe not. That’s if she even would choose to make one in the first place. I wouldn’t blame her if she wouldn’t. She finally got out of that situation and back to her family, I won’t tear her away from it and make her relive everything if there’s any other way of getting this bitch.”  
“Va bene,” Carina agreed. “But let’s be careful, alright?” she continued as she pushed her brother into a crouching position behind a bush tree in the front yard as she heard a dog bark in the street.  
The golden retriever seemed to stop right in front of their chosen house and barked several times in their direction.  
“What’s up with you today, bud?” a soft male voice asked. “It’s not like Miles and his lot are at home for you to bark at them on their bikes. Come here, Lucky, let’s go home. No need to be out any more than we need to in these times.”  
“Phew,” Carina breathed out after they heard the man put a leash on his dog and the sound of human feet and dog paws thrumming against the asphalt as they ran in the other direction.

The siblings made their way to ‘Opal’s house, moving closely to its walls. They were about to turn the corner when they heard the sound of steps and as Andrew popped his head to see what was happening, he saw the red-headed woman dialing a number on her phone.  
“Where are you?” she growled at the recipient on the other end. “We need to move.”  
They waited for a few minutes until the criminal disappeared back into her house.  
“How are we getting in?” Carina wondered.  
“The window?” Andrew suggested.  
“No way, fratellino,” his sister protested as she dragged him towards the backdoor of the house. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. This didn’t stop the Italian doctor as she grabbed a hairpin from her pocket and started working on the lock.  
“Carina, where the hell did you learn that?” the younger DeLuca asked, but as he heard his sister chuckle, he change his mind. “Wait, don’t tell me.”  
“Remember Gloria?”  
“Gloria as in my girlfriend from med school? You met her one time.”  
“Yes, and that one time we ended up locked out from her dorm room.”  
Andrew raised his arms in protest.  
“Alright, I don’t need to hear any more, I know how this story ends. Why do you always do that anyway?”  
“Shh, Andrea, we’ve got too much work to do right now to be worrying about your fragile male ego,” she chastised him.  
“You know what? Maybe I should start sleeping with your girlfriends…and boyfriends,” he mumbled back in frustration.  
At that Carina turned back to him and raised her eyebrows at him as if to say ‘really’?

The lock finally clicked and they let themselves in. On the inside the house appeared to be barren and empty like the places where detectives would set up if they wanted to tail one of the nearby houses. The air was musty as if the air had not been cleared in months. The hollowness of the home also meant that they would have to be extremely careful not to make any noise as they moved about the house. They heard footsteps on the stairs nearby and a shadow of red hair as a female figure moved upstairs. Now they only had to hope that ‘Opal’ was the only person in the house.  
“What are we looking for exactly?”  
“I’m not sure yet,” Andrew said. “But I suggest we start in the basement.”  
They found themselves in front of yet another closed door, but this one proved more difficult to open just with Carina’s hairpin as it was secured with a thick chain. Andrew tried pulling on the chain, but there was no way he was going to be able to rip through it just with his bare hands. He tried to push the entire weight of his body against the door, but the only result was a dull sound accompanied by a sharp pain in his side.  
“Hello?” a weak female voice cried from the other side.  
“Yes, hi! What’s your name?” Carina asked.  
“Kay. Kay Miller,” the girl mumbled.  
“Alright, Kay. Don’t worry, we are here to help you.”  
“Don’t let them take us away please,” the young voice stuttered out.  
“Us? Is there more of you in there?” Andrew asked, but he didn’t get any answer.  
“Andrea, try to have a look around and try to find something that would help us open this,” the older DeLuca instructed her sibling in Italian.  
“Right,” Andrew mumbled as he realized that the girl was too terrified to speak to a man right now and he tiptoed away from the basement back into the house.  
“Kay, can you hear me?” the OB/GYN asked. “He’s gone, you can talk to me now. Do you have some more friends with you?”  
“Yes, there’s two more girls.”  
“Can I talk to them now?”  
“No. They’re asleep, they’re sick.”  
“How sick?”  
But before the girl could respond she heard a loud yell of ‘police! Don’t move!’ upstairs and heard her brother cry out in pain as someone slammed him against the floor. Carina took out her cell phone from her pocket and fired of a quick coded message to Maya.  
“Kay, listen to me. I have to go for a bit now, but I will be right back and we will get you into safety, alright?”  
“Please, don’t leave,” the girl begged, but Carina had already run up the stairs.  
"There she is," Opal cried, pointing her finger towards Carina. "The crazy guy's sister. I just came to check in on my mother's old house and these two were roaming around here. I was so scared, I had to call 911 immediately."  
"Don't worry, ma'am, you're safe now," one of the policeman said, putting a calming hand on 'Opal's' shoulder.  
Andrew was trying to say something from his position on the ground, but his words came out muffled by his mask.  
"You're making a big mistake," Carina said. "Please, just have a look at the basement. This woman is a human trafficker and she's holding three girls hostage."  
One of the cops sent her a pitying look.  
"Ma'am, I know what it's like to be related to someone who is a little," he made a whistling noise while pointing to his head. "But it doesn't mean that you get the right for breaking and entering because of their whims."  
"No," Carina barked back. "Nobody is crazy here, okay? Andrew is right and you need to arrest this woman and you will see that you do when you check the basement."  
"Please, it's about young girls lives," Andrew pleaded as he finally fought to lift up his head from the ground a little.  
But the cops remained adamant as the nice of the two proceeded to cuff Carina's hands behind her back and they led the two siblings into their car. No manner of arguing with them on their ride seemed t convince them of 'Opal's' wrongdoing either.

The lock of the cell at the precinct squeaked as the guard locked it, leaving the two Italian siblings on the other side of the bars. The four policemen were already walking away presumably to return back to their office.  
“Hey,” Andrew kept calling after the cops. “Hey, come back. You have to listen to me!”  
“Shut your trap, man,” the warden growled.  
Andrew ignored his harsh words and when none of the cops appeared to be showing any interest in coming back, he started pounding on the iron bars with his hands.  
“Andrea, calmati!” Carina said, but her brother shook her hand off from his shoulder.  
“I will. Once those girls are safe,” he barked back as he continued his pounding and when it was not working, he started hurling some insults at the cops’ backs. That seemed to work its charm as the captain alongside the two sergeants came back.  
“Open it up, Joe,” the tallest of the policemen told the warden.  
“Sure thing, cap.”  
“Finally. Will you listen to me now?” DeLuca asked in relief.  
But as the bars opened, the captain motioned to his bulky sergeant who stepped forward and pushed Andrew back with such a force that the doctor lost his balance and fell down on his back with a thud.  
“Andrea,” Carina cried out as she staggered to help him back up.  
“When my old pal Joe here asks you to shut your trap, it means you shut your trap,” the captain growled.  
“Do you understand?” the sergeant asked, cracking his knuckles loudly.  
“You have to listen to us. The people in that house are trafficking human beings. There are girls in danger directly in that house. And you can save them, all you have to do is listen to me and go back to check,” Andrew pleaded coming close to the captain’s face.  
“Funny story, pal. Except the lady on whose property you and your sister were trespassing told us you would try to tell us something like that. Said you were crazy, I had a look into your records and turns out lady was right.”  
“I’m not crazy,” the brown-haired young man huffed.  
“He isn’t. He has an illness yes, but he is getting proper treatment and he’s doing well. And he’s telling you the truth,” Carina tried to argue in support of her brother.  
“Or maybe you’re just his sister and can’t see his crazy,” the captain responded as he turned on his heels and tried to leave the cell.  
Except Andrew grabbed him by the back of this uniform. Before Carina could react, the bulky sergeant grabbed her brother by the wrists and hit him against the wall. She could hear Andrew take in a sharp inhale of breath and his eyes darted around the place and she was sure if she was any closer to him, she would hear his heart pounding in his chest.  
“Stop struggling,” the sergeant told him, but it didn’t appear that the doctor had heard him as he head-butted him with all his force.  
“Son of a bitch,” the cop cursed as he touched his bleeding nose. “Dude is really freaking crazy.”  
“He isn’t, he’s having a panic attack, you need to stop touching him” Carina tried to explain recalling the time that her brother had been a victim of a physical attack before, which left its psychological damage no matter how hard he had appeared to have gotten over Karev's beating quickly, but none of the policemen appeared to be listening to her and two of the three men moved to grab Andrew and pushed him against the wall.  
As he kept struggling even against the doubled force, showing an almost inhuman strength in the midst of his panic attack, the sturdy cop returned to the scuffle again and pushed against Andrew, forcing him into a lying position on the bench and kneeling on his chest to prevent him from moving.  
“Stop, you’re going to kill him,” Carina cried, but when she tried to approach her brother, the warden grabbed her and prevented her from moving any closer.  
The next several minutes appeared to the Italian doctor as if in a haze as she kept fighting the man’s grasp on her while she watched as Andrew struggled against the weight on his chest. A stream of Italian swearwords left her mouth as she noticed how his breaths became more and more labored until he closed his eyes and became completely still.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that I'm neither a doctor nor a medical professional, so please take any medical stuff in here with a grain of salt (even if I tried to research some stuff as best as I could).

“Let’s get him to Seattle Press,”  
“We need to get to Grey-Sloan’s,” Carina corrected the ambulance driver.  
“But they’re closed to trauma.”  
“I don’t care. They will take this one, trust me.”  
“You’re exhausted, let’s switch,” the EMT told Carina as he noticed the sweat streaking down her forehead as she kept on with the chest compressions while he squeezed the oxygen bag.  
“No,” she cut him off as they pulled into the hospital’s ambulance bay.

“Do we know what we’re getting?” Owen asked pulling on his gloves as he looked to the side at Bailey and Helm.  
“No. Dispatch just said that there was someone on board of the ambulance insisting that they need to come here.”  
As the vehicle’s door opened, the EMT started to list off the facts about the patient.  
“30-year-old male, heavy trauma to the chest area, bad breath sounds, resuscitated on the scene, but crashed again on the way here, she’s not been able to bring him back yet.”  
Only then did the doctors take in the sight of to whom the tiny frame leaning over the body and performing CPR belonged.  
“DeLuca!” Bailey cried. “What the hell happened?”  
“Stupid American cops happened,” she growled as she continued the chest compressions while the EMTs helped Owen to get the gurney out.  
Bailey’s eyes fell on the dark curls of the young man that she was trying to resuscitate and shrieked as she recognized the pale face of one of her subordinates, her mind throwing her to the conversations she had had with him earlier today. What did this sweet, kind-hearted boy do to deserve this? She felt a little sick as she realized this wasn’t even the first time for him.  
“You alright?” Owen asked as he noticed her freezing.  
“I…,” she stuttered.  
“Chief, step out. Helm get Wilson and let’s page Shepherd and Pierce.”  
“Uh, Pierce already left and we couldn’t reach her when we tried to because of Grey.”  
“What’s up with Grey now? I thought she was awake,” Owen asked.  
“She took a turn for the worse, we had to put her on a vent.”  
While the two were talking, Bailey recovered somewhat and put a shaky hand on Carina's shoulder.  
"DeLuca, let's switch,"  
"No," the Italian insisted.  
As they rolled the gurney into an exam room, Jo and Amelia joined them.  
"Alright, Wilson take over CPR. Dr. DeLuca, I will need you to step out of my exam room," Owen commanded in a tone that gave Carina no room to argue back. Sighing heavily she allowed Jo to take over and she took a few uncertain steps backwards.  
"You too, chief," Owen added.  
Bailey pursed her lips as if to say something, but thought better of it. Instead she put her arm around Carina's back and told her: ""Let's go to my office."

******

"Can I call someone for you?" Bailey asked as Carina stood uncertainly moving from foot to foot in her office.  
"Maya," Carina said, trailing off as she took out her cell phone and dialed her girlfriends' number. The phone went straight to voicemail. She tried ringing several of Bishop's colleagues as well as Station 19 directly. For the few calls that went through, she didn't receive any answers either.  
"Dio mio," the Italian doctor cried as she hid her face in her hands.  
"What is it?" the smaller doctor asked.  
"When I heard the cops coming into the house, I sent Maya a message," she tried to explain, showing the chief of surgery the brief text of 911, an address and sick girls trapped in basement.  
"And now, something might have happened to Maya as well and Andrea is...," DeLuca trailed off into a stream of Italian that Bailey couldn't follow.  
"Okay, slow down," Miranda said, continuing to speak in order to reassure both Carina and herself: "I'm sure Bishop and the rest of her crew are okay. Can you tell me what exactly happened today?"

******

“Ok, we’ve got a rhythm.”  
“Let’s get a chest X-ray stat, there could be an internal bleed,” Owen commanded.  
“And a head CT stat,” Amelia added as she shone a light into DeLuca’s eyes, throwing a concerned look towards her ex-husband.  
“Right here, see,” Owen told Helm, pointing his finger towards a dark smudge on the tablet as the results of the chest X-ray loaded.  
“The rib perforated his aorta,” the resident said.  
“Any word on Pierce?”  
“Still nothing.”  
“What about Altman?” Amelia wondered, hoping that Owen wasn’t letting the problems in his personal life affect the chances their injured colleague had for survival.  
He shook his head.  
“She tested positive in the latest batch of tests,” the trauma surgeon explained. “Schmitt!” he called out as he noticed the resident walking near the trauma room.  
“Yes?” the young doctor asked, popping his head into the door.  
“I need you to run to the hotel and find Pierce and get her here,” he explained as the resident’s eyes fell on the patient on the examination table.  
“Oh my god, what happened?” Schmitt asked, frozen in place.  
“Schmitt! I told you to run! Get Pierce before DeLuca bleeds out on the table. We’re taking him up now. Tell Pierce to meet us in the OR.”  
“Yes, sir.”

*****

Maggie snuggled closer into Winston’s side and he kissed the top of her head. Had her long distance boyfriend surprised her any other time than during a worldwide pandemic, she could have imagined more creative ways of spending her time with him. But as things were now, she wished for nothing more than curling up into him and getting some sleep first.  
“Sleep, I will be here when you wake up,” he told her.  
It seemed like just seconds after she closed her eyes, somebody was pounding at the door. She felt a little colder as Winston uncurled himself from her and stood up to open the door.  
“Just ignore it,” she slurred.  
But the banging didn’t appear to relent, only got stronger and there now was a male voice shouting through the door.  
“Doctor Pierce! We need you.”  
“Alright, Schmitt, I’m coming, just stop yelling,” she answered as she also stood up from the bed and put on a mask.  
When she opened the door, the resident was standing on the other side, panting heavily, obviously having run here all the way from the hospital.  
“What the hell is going on, Schmitt?”  
“It’s Dr. DeLuca, I think he was in an accident or something, I don’t have the full story, but he has a few broken ribs and one of them perforated his aorta.”  
“Andrew’s hurt? Why didn’t somebody call me?”  
“They’ve been calling you since last night,” Levi said as Maggie turned to grab her phone. “I think there’s something you should probably know before you look. It’s about Doctor Grey.”  
But his warning came too late, as Maggie was already scrolling through her phone. She stumbled a little and Winston grasped her shoulder’s from behind.  
“Are you alright?”  
“It’s Meredith. They had to put her on a vent.”  
“I’m so sorry, Maggie.”  
“Schmitt, why didn’t they get Altman to help DeLuca? We’re losing precious time.”  
“She tested positive last night.”  
“Alright,” Maggie said as she slammed the door into the resident’s face.  
“Maggie, are you okay?” Winston asked softly.  
Her answer came as a hollow laugh.  
“I thought yesterday that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, but once again I was wrong. I just need a minute, is all. One minute where nothing goes wrong. But I don’t get to have it, do I?”  
“Hey,” her boyfriend said putting two of his big hands on her shoulders. “Take a calm breath. In and out. Things seem dark right now, but it will all end eventually. There’s nothing you can do for Meredith now but pray. But this…,” he motioned towards the closed door.  
“I can actually do something about this,” Maggie said strongly. “Why didn’t you say so straight away?”

*****

“What have we got?” Maggie asked as she walked into the OR, trying very hard to not see Andrew as the person she knew but rather as a patient on the table. Given their past fling it was even harder to do, because with all the sex they were having back then, she felt like she knew every inch of his body. She had already fought very hard to push down any memories that tried to surface from the last time she operated on a close one.  
She listened as Helm listed off the injuries and looked through the X-rays. As the resident mentioned how long he had been down and that already had to bring him back a few times, she shot a questioning look towards Amelia who was watching the monitors.  
Her adopted sister shook her head in response.  
“We have brain activity, but we won’t really know until he wakes up if there are any deficits.”  
“How did this happen again?” Maggie asked as she inspected the broken ribs. The injuries weren’t really reminiscent of blunt force trauma that would usually cause them in a car accident or in a fall and they didn’t seem to be a result of CPR either.  
“We don’t have the full story,” Owen explained. “Carina brought him in, but she was pretty shaken up.”  
Just as Helm was about to speak up, the door to the OR opened and the chief of surgery peeked in.  
“How are we doing? Please tell me I don’t get to tell Carina DeLuca any more bad news today.”  
“We had to do a thoracostomy to drain his hemothorax, but the X-rays also showed a thoracic aorta injury.”  
“Are you going for endovascular repair?” Bailey questioned her head of cardio.  
“Yes, I’m just about to.”  
“Alright. Shepherd?”  
“Carina’s quick response ensured that I’m not seeing any decrease in brain activity for now, but we will need to monitor him closely and…,” she trailed off as some things were better left unsaid. Even if Andrew managed to survive Pierce’s procedure, there was still a significant risk that it would leave him a paraplegic.  
“Christ. Those stupid irresponsible imbeciles, they see somebody different and what do they always do? They decide that the only way to respond is to squash them.”  
“Who, Bailey? Did Carina tell you what happened?” the cardio surgeon questioned never unglueing her eyes from the screen as she inserted the catheter.  
“Those damn cops. Two of my attendings went on a wild goose chase hunting sex traffickers and instead of commending them for doing their work, the cops decided to arrest them. This only a day after they believed a white perpetrator over black teenage girls and arrested a couple of black firemen. Apparently, they decided it was not enough and today they believed when another sex trafficker told them that DeLuca was crazy. And when he tried to convince them to go back to the sex traffickers’ house because he knew there were a bunch of girls still trapped in there, they decided they had to pacify him.”  
“Wait? The cops did this?” Amelia piped up.  
“Of course they did,” Maggie growled.

*****

_  
Andrew opened his eyes slowly and breathed in the sweet smell of the glass of gelato that was standing on the table in front of him in the small Mediterranean café he found himself in. He recognized it to be one they used to visit back when he was a small boy in Italy. Except the place appeared to be completely quiet, unlike the noisy crowded place from his memories that was always buzzing with locals and tourists of every age. He looked up and cried out in surprise as he noticed the brown-haired hazel-eyed pretty woman who was leisurely sitting in the chair opposite him.  
“Mama?” he asked, his voice hitching in his throat.  
“Andrea.” she smiled at him.  
“But how? Am I dead? Or dreaming?”  
“Neither or both, depending on how you look at it,” she explained ominously.  
“I miss you so much.”  
“I know,” she whispered, raising her right hand in order to cup his cheek in her cold palm. He leaned into the touch, eager to get the contact he had been craving over the past few years.  
“I wish we had more time,” she sighed, pursing her lips.  
He looked around, dazed.  
“It seems like we have all the time in the world right now.”  
“No, not yet,” she shook her head vehemently. “I don’t think it’s your time just yet.”  
“What is this then?”  
“A crossroads. Between one road and another perhaps.”  
“I’m really glad I got to see you again. I just wish you could stop talking in riddles.”  
She looked at her son pensively before she whispered: “Just know that I’m proud of you, baby.”  
Andrew furrowed his brow.  
“A lot of people keep telling me that these past couple days.”  
A warm smile crossed her face.  
“Perhaps because it needs to be said more.”  
Suddenly he could smell the salt of the sea and the café had dissolved in front of him and instead he felt the touch of sand under his feet.  
_

“I think I see David,” Koracic croaked from his position on Meredith’s side.  
Meredith smiled.  
“Good for you, Tom,” she said as she squeezed his hand to prompt him to approach his son.  
“I’ll be right back, just don’t go into the light without me, Grey. We’ve still got a score to settle on who the best surgeon at Grey-Sloan is” he said and, in a fashion, atypical of him he kissed the top of her head. As he was doing so, he noticed the curly haired figured in the distance.  
“Don’t miss me too much. It looks like you’ll have company on your own anyway.”  
As the neurosurgeon walked in the direction from which he felt his offspring’s calling, Meredith looked to the left and prepared herself for another encounter with Derek. Her smile froze as she noticed that the features of the man who was approaching her.  
“Andrew?” she choked out.  
“Mer, I…don’t know what’s going on,” the younger doctor echoed the words he had spoken to her only a few weeks back.  
Understanding where his worry was coming from, Meredith reached out to hold his hand and pulled him down into a sitting position next to her.  
“It’s alright, Andrew. This isn’t your mind playing tricks on you. It’s real…at least I think it is, so does Koracic.”  
“Are you sure? I swear I just talked to my mum, Mer. But that’s not…it couldn’t…she’s been dead for years!”  
“Yeah. That tends to happen around here a lot.”  
But Andrew didn’t appear to have heard her comment, as he continued to mumble in confusion.  
“And I was supposed to take my meds and I was going to, but then something happened. I can’t recall what and I thought I was alright, but I’m not so sure anymore and I just don’t know what to do.”  
“Andrew,” Meredith called out to him, cupping his cheeks in her cold palms. “You’re okay. This…whatever it is, is real.”  
“Really?” he asked, his eyes huge and full of hope.  
“Really,” Meredith confirmed.  
He released a relieved breath and she could feel him become less rigid. George had said that their bodies weren’t real here, but Andrew’s palpating heartbeats, the sweat on his forehead and his heavy breaths had seemed real enough to her.  
“But the real question is how and why are you here? Tom and I we’re here because the plague got the better of us, but it’s something else with you. Can you try to remember for me?”  
“Okay,” he agreed, closing his eyes.

  


  


**Author's Note:**

> I know that American readers and even readers from other countries will find this story reminiscent of the events that happened in the US last summer. However this story is actually inspired by a different story that happened two years earlier in Belgium. This case hasn't really caused much international uproar outside of Belgium and Slovakia (and even here due to a lot of people's ignorance of MI issues, you will find a lot of commenters agreeing with the Belgian policemen and saying they were correct that the victim was drunk or high - which he wasn't as confirmed by autopsy report). 
> 
> Jozef Chovanec, a national of Slovakia was arrested at Charleroi airport in Belgium back in February 2018. The man was in obvious mental distress, banging his head against his cell (later it was revealed that he had been diagnosed with a bunch of mental health illnesses in 2016 and was taking medication for them under a psychiatrists care). A group of policemen forcibly restrained him and one of them sat on Chovanec's chest for 16 minutes while the whole thing was being taped and one of their female colleagues performed a "Heil Hitler" salute. You can read more about the story here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53864100
> 
> As an Eastern European myself I want to believe that this was a case of incompetence rather than xenophobia towards the people who were unfortunate enough to be born (or have ancestors who were born) on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. But in case it was incompetence, I still feel like it's important to bring the story up to shine a light on the kind of incompetence that seems to be common for some first responders when coming to face with people who are struggling with mental health illnesses.


End file.
